Outdated: please disregard this article as it is out of date. I install node in my local filespace on Ubuntu now as its so much easier to manage. Basicaly I download the Linux binaries and put them in ~/apps/nodejs/current, then add ~/apps/nodejs/current/bin to my path using my shell profile (~/.profile). This makes using npm -g really easy and does not require the sudo command.

nodejs is a very popular framework for JavaScript development, but as I found out at the MongoDB hackathon its not that straight forward to get going. So here is a quick guide to get going with Node.js on Ubuntu.